Life: No Day At The Beach

In Life, even a day at the beach can go bad. It certainly did for this week’s victim, who was stabbed on the boardwalk, yet somehow no one saw anything. The other catch is that the victim just returned from an extended tour of duty in Iraq. So how could a highly trained soldier survive a war zone but get stabbed in the heart on a bright and sunny day? Charlie Crews and his temporary partner Bobby Stark want the answer to that question.

With a little work, Crews and Stark learn the victim was staying in a nearby hotel with three friends—two guys, one woman—who are all soldiers on leave. They claim to have all been sitting by the pool when their friend went out for his usual run, and Crews doesn’t have any real reason to suspect any of them. He is however, suspicious of their reason for being at the beach in the first place. They claim they’re on vacation, but Crews learns that they’re really there moonlighting as security guards…an Army no-no.

See there’s a service run by a nerdy Army reject kid (only on Life) that provides enlisted soldiers with private security gigs. This service is booming because soldiers make less than minimum wage on duty and need the money. The victim was doing security for a private corporation called Chem-X-Tech. Crews tracks down the head honcho who seems like not all his dogs are barking. The guy fervently denies that the victim’s death had anything to do with his work for Chem-X-Tech. Sure, that’s what they all say.

Crews goes back to the drawing board and thanks to a little long-distance interaction with Reese, he has a breakthrough. He looks through the victim’s duffel bag and amidst the dirty clothes and medals there is a lightweight bulletproof vest from his days in Iraq. Crews looks at it and sees that it was made by Chem-X-Tech. So the same guy the victim was supposed to protect was in charge of protecting him in Iraq. Coincidence? Not in a murder investigation.

Crews confronts the Chem-X-Tech CEO who tells him that the vests were too expensive for the government to buy for soldiers (like Batman’s body armor in Batman Begins!), so he gave some to a few select units. And to prove how effective they are, Mr. CEO puts on one of the vests and shoots himself in the chest at point-blank range three times. Not a scratch. So then where did the victim’s medal come from?

Crews realizes that it wasn’t the victim’s but a fifth member of the squad who was killed by a sniper in Iraq. He was shot in the chest and was wearing a vest, so shouldn’t he have survived? Crews and Stark go back to Mr. CEO to confront him, only to find that the remaining squad members are there to kill him. Why? Because the vests only have a shelf life of two years due to the chemicals involved, but the CEO lied and told the military they worked for five. But they can’t get the CEO to confess to killing the victim on the boardwalk and engineering the whole thing. So Crews and Stark say they will march him down the hallway where the squad waits to shoot him but he’ll be fine because they’ll let him wear the victim’s three-year-old vest so he will be bulletproof right? That does the trick.

We also learn that the whole story of Ted falling for Rayborn’s security lady Amanda and letting her snoop around Crews’ house (which had me mystified and cursing Ted last week) was a setup! Crews and Ted were in on it the whole time and are now blackmailing Amanda into showing them all of her security footage so Crews can figure out whether or not Rayborn really is dead and if so, who killed him? And the last shot hints that someone you never would have expected might have had something to do with it.

This is a fantastic episode with a typically original murder investigation, no easy feat when every other show on tv is a procedural.

Season 2, Episode 17: Shelf Life (originally aired March 11, 2009)

For another take on this episode, read Operation Fun in the Sun by Elma Rahman here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal